URBANA, Ill. - Crop yields in the fragile semi-arid areas of Zimbabwe have been declining over time due to a decline in soil fertility resulting from mono-cropping, lack of fertilizer, and other factors. In collaboration with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), University of Illinois researchers evaluated the use of a precision farming technique called "microdosing," its effect on food security, and its ability to improve yield at a low cost to farmers. "Microdosing involves applying a small, affordable amount of fertilizer ...

MATERIALS – Lighter, stronger engines . . . Engines could become lighter and more efficient because of a research project that combines the talents and resources of the Chrysler Group, Nemak S.A. of Mexico and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The goal of the four-year $5.5 million cooperative research and development agreement is to develop an advanced cast aluminum alloy for next-generation higher efficiency engines. In addition to being lighter, the new alloy for cylinder heads would be stronger and capable of sustaining the higher temperatures and pressures of engines ...

Preschoolers can be smarter than college students at figuring out how unusual toys and gadgets work because they're more flexible and less biased than adults in their ideas about cause and effect, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Edinburgh. The findings suggest that technology and innovation can benefit from the exploratory learning and probabilistic reasoning skills that come naturally to young children, many of whom are learning to use smartphones even before they can tie their shoelaces. The findings also ...

In the first study of its type, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have looked at the health threat to pregnant women with a history of Kawasaki disease (KD), concluding that the risks are low with informed management and care. The findings are published in the March 6, 2014 online edition of the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. KD is a childhood condition affecting the coronary arteries. It is the most common cause of acquired heart disease in children. First recognized in Japan following World War II, KD diagnoses ...

SEATTLE – A simple questionnaire that rates breathing difficulties on a scale of 0 to 3 predicts survival in chronic graft-vs.-host disease, according to a study published in the March issue of Biology of Blood and Marrow Transplantation. And although a poor score means a higher risk of death, asking a simple question that can spot lung involvement early means that patients can begin treatments to reduce or manage symptoms, said senior author Stephanie Lee, M.D., M.P.H., research director of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center's Long-Term Follow-Up Program, member ...

Beta Pictoris, a nearby star easily visible to the naked eye in the southern sky, is already hailed as the archetypal young planetary system. It is known to harbour a planet that orbits some 1.2 billion kilometres from the star, and it was one of the first stars found to be surrounded by a large disc of dusty debris [1]. New observations from ALMA now show that the disc is permeated by carbon monoxide gas. Paradoxically the presence of carbon monoxide, which is so harmful to humans on Earth, could indicate that the Beta Pictoris planetary system may eventually become ...

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope have discovered the splattered remains of comets colliding together around a nearby star; the researchers believe they are witnessing the total destruction of one of these icy bodies once every five minutes. The "smoking gun" implicating this frosty demolition is the detection of a surprisingly compact region of carbon monoxide (CO) gas swirling around the young, nearby star Beta Pictoris. "Molecules of CO can survive around a star for only a brief time, about 100 years, before being ...

Astronomers exploring the disk of debris around the young star Beta Pictoris have discovered a compact cloud of carbon monoxide located about 8 billion miles (13 billion kilometers) from the star. This concentration of poisonous gas – usually destroyed by starlight – is being constantly replenished by ongoing rapid-fire collisions among a swarm of icy, comet-like bodies. In fact, to offset the destruction of carbon monoxide (CO) molecules around the star, a large comet must be getting completely destroyed every five minutes, say researchers. They suggest the comet swarm ...

Breast cancer patients with high levels of vitamin D in their blood are twice as likely to survive the disease as women with low levels of this nutrient, report University of California, San Diego School of Medicine researchers in the March issue of Anticancer Research. In previous studies, Cedric F. Garland, DrPH, professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, showed that low vitamin D levels were linked to a high risk of premenopausal breast cancer. That finding, he said, prompted him to question the relationship between 25-hydroxyvitamin D — a metabolite ...

UT Arlington biochemists say their newly published study brings researchers a step closer to understanding how the commonly used synthetic compound bisphenol-A, or BPA, may promote breast cancer growth. Subhrangsu Mandal, associate professor of chemistry/biochemistry, and Arunoday Bhan, a PhD student in Mandal's lab, looked at a molecule called RNA HOTAIR. HOTAIR is an abbreviation for long, non-coding RNA, a part of DNA in humans and other vertebrates. HOTAIR does not produce a protein on its own but, when it is being expressed or functioning, it can suppress genes that ...

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite provided a look at the rainfall associated with the large storm system that brought soaking rains to California on Feb. 28 and Mar. 1. Satellite imagery created at NASA shows the movement of the storm from the U.S. West Coast to the East Coast. At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. images were created using data from the TRMM Microwave Imager (TMI) instrument that showed the movement of recent stormy weather from California's Pacific Ocean coast to the Atlantic Coast. TRMM is a satellite managed ...

In the giant system that connects Earth to the sun, one key event happens over and over: solar material streams toward Earth and the giant magnetic bubble around Earth, the magnetosphere helps keep it at bay. The parameters, however, change: The particles streaming in could be from the constant solar wind, or perhaps from a giant cloud erupting off the sun called a coronal mass ejection, or CME. Sometimes the configuration is such that the magnetosphere blocks almost all the material, other times the connection is long and strong, allowing much material in. Understanding ...

Light can trigger coordinated, wavelike motions of atoms in atom-thin layers of crystal, scientists have shown. The waves, called phonon polaritons, are far shorter than light waves and can be "tuned" to particular frequencies and amplitudes by varying the number of layers of crystal, they report in the early online edition of Science March 7. These properties - observed in this class of material for the first time - open the possibility of using polaritons to convey information in tight spaces, create images at far finer resolution than is possible with light, and manage ...

The Earth's magnetic field, or magnetosphere, stretches from the planet's core out into space, where it meets the solar wind, a stream of charged particles emitted by the sun. For the most part, the magnetosphere acts as a shield to protect the Earth from this high-energy solar activity. But when this field comes into contact with the sun's magnetic field — a process called "magnetic reconnection" — powerful electrical currents from the sun can stream into Earth's atmosphere, whipping up geomagnetic storms and space weather phenomena that can affect high-altitude aircraft, ...

Large river networks — such as those that funnel into the Colorado and Mississippi rivers — may seem to be permanent features of a landscape. In fact, many rivers define political boundaries that have been in place for centuries. But scientists have long suspected that river networks are not as static as they may appear, and have gathered geologic and biological evidence that suggest many rivers have been "rewired," shifting and moving across a landscape over millions of years. Now researchers at MIT and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) have developed ...

Researchers have debated for more than two decades the likely impacts, if any, of global warming on the worldwide incidence of malaria, a mosquito-borne disease that infects more than 300 million people each year. Now, researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and the University of Michigan, with colleagues, are reporting the first hard evidence that malaria does—as had long been predicted—creep to higher elevations during warmer years and back down to lower altitudes when temperatures cool. The study, due to be published in Science and based ...

LA JOLLA, CA, and NASHVILLE, TN – March 6, 2014 – Researchers at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and Vanderbilt University have created the most detailed 3-D picture yet of a membrane protein that is linked to learning, memory, anxiety, pain and brain disorders such as schizophrenia, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and autism. "This receptor family is an exciting new target for future medicines for treatment of brain disorders," said P. Jeffrey Conn, PhD, Lee E. Limbird Professor of Pharmacology and director of the Vanderbilt Center for Neuroscience Drug Discovery, who ...

In the tropical highlands of South America and East Africa, cool temperatures have historically kept mosquito-borne diseases, such as malaria, at bay. New research by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) scientists shows that as annual temperatures rise in these areas, malaria can spread to populations in higher elevations that had historically not been at as much risk of being infected by malaria parasites. HHMI scientists have compared the yearly distribution of malaria cases in two mountainous regions in South America and East Africa, and found that in warmer years, ...

A group of international scientists have completed the first global inventory of flu strains in birds by reviewing more than 50 published studies and genetic data, providing new insight into the drivers of viral diversity and the emergence of disease that can ultimately impact human health and livelihoods. The research, published in the journal PLOS ONE and performed as part of the USAID PREDICT project, identified over 116 avian flu strains in wild birds. This is roughly twice the number that were found in domestic birds, and more than ten times the number found in humans. ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Much of the research on post-combat mental health of veterans focuses on problems like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and major depression. A paper co-authored by R. Tyson Smith, visiting assistant professor of sociology, takes an even broader snapshot of returning soldiers' mental state by focusing instead on the identity conflict many face when transitioning from soldier to civilian life and how that conflict manifests as mental distress. The paper was published in the January issue of Society and Mental Health. "You can't ...

Flawed but colorful diamonds are among the most sensitive detectors of magnetic fields known today, allowing physicists to explore the minuscule magnetic fields in metals, exotic materials and even human tissue. University of California, Berkeley, physicist Dmitry Budker and his colleagues at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and UCLA have now shown that these diamond sensors can measure the tiny magnetic fields in high-temperature superconductors, providing a new tool to probe these much ballyhooed but poorly understood materials. "Diamond sensors will give ...

Boston, MA – A team of Alzheimer's disease (AD) researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) has been able to study the underlying causes of AD and develop assays to test newer approaches to treatment by using stem cells derived from related family members with a genetic predisposition to (AD). "In the past, research of human cells impacted by AD has been largely limited to postmortem tissue samples from patients who have already succumbed to the disease," said Dr. Tracy L. Young-Pearse, corresponding author of the study recently published in Human Molecular Genetics ...

E-cigarettes, promoted as a way to quit regular cigarettes, may actually be a new route to conventional smoking and nicotine addiction for teenagers, according to a new UC San Francisco study. In the first analysis of the relationship between e-cigarette use and smoking among adolescents in the United States, UCSF researchers found that adolescents who used the devices were more likely to smoke cigarettes and less likely to quit smoking. The study of nearly 40,000 youth around the country also found that e-cigarette use among middle and high school students doubled between ...

Ever worry about losing your mobile-phone reception? The problem is a weak microwave signal. The same problem hampers cosmologists looking at the early universe, a glimpse embodied in the cosmic microwave background. Or take a pressing earthly example: oncologists often locate and identify tumors using MRI scans. All three of these efforts---communications, cosmology, medicine---depend on discriminating weak microwave or radio signals from a noisy environment. A new approach to this important problem provides a clean, all-optical detection of microwaves and radiowaves ...

An international group led by Vanderbilt University researchers has found cannabinoid receptors, through which marijuana exerts its effects, in a key emotional hub in the brain involved in regulating anxiety and the flight-or-fight response. This is the first time cannabinoid receptors have been identified in the central nucleus of the amygdala in a mouse model, they report in the current issue of the journal Neuron. The discovery may help explain why marijuana users say they take the drug mainly to reduce anxiety, said Sachin Patel, M.D., Ph.D., the paper's senior ...